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Asked: 2026-06-09T00:01:30+00:00

Using JodaTime library (although I am a bit flexible). I realized some of the

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Using JodaTime library (although I am a bit flexible). I realized some of the inputs coming in are breaking Joda time because the days of the month are above 31 or below 1 (because of client-side code).

I am using the LocalDate object for calendar manipulation. Is there a library or method to easily sanitize the dates so the input doesn’t start throwing exceptions?

Some Scala code I am using now: EDIT: Fixed code

 val now = new LocalDate();
 val workingDate = now.withYear(y).withMonthOfYear(m).withDayOfMonth(d).withDayOfWeek(DateTimeConstants.SUNDAY)

 ymdStart = toTimestampAtStart( workingDate )

For clarification, the goal here is to convert the date to a proper date, so if a user submitted July 38, it would convert to August 7. There’s an incoming URL structure causing a lot of this and it looks like /timeline/2012/07/30.

For reasons of pure exercise (I agree normalization seems to be bad practice) I’m now just purely curious if there are libraries that deal with such a problem.

Thanks!

Final Update:

Like the answer points out, normalization was a poor idea. I did a lot of re-factoring on the client side to fix the incoming variables. This is the code I ended up using:

ymdStart = new Timestamp( toTimestampAtStart( new LocalDate(y,m,d).withDayOfWeek(1) ).getTime - 86400000 )
ymdEnd = new Timestamp( ymdStart.getTime + 691200000 )
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    First of all, a LocalDate is immutable, so each chained with...() is creating a new date.

    Second, it is a well-known antipattern to update pieces of a date one at a time. The end result will depend on the current value of the date, the order in which you update the pieces, and whether or not the implementation “normalizes” dates.

    In other words NEVER update a date/time piecemeal.

    Assume for a minute that the implementation “normalizes” (i.e. corrects for overflow) invalid dates. Given your code, if today’s date was 31-Jan-2011 and you did

    now.setMonth(FEBRUARY);
now.setDayOfMonth(12);

    the result will be 12-March-2011. The first statement sets the date to 31-February, which gets normalized to 03-March, then the day gets set to 12. Ah, you say, you can just set the day-of-month first. But that doesn’t work for different starting points (construction of which is left as an exercise).

    And from your question I surmise that JodaTime throws exceptions rather than normalize, which is anothe reason for not doing it this way.

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